“And the air is bad for me,” she went on. “What are you going to do if I die? It’s all because of your stupid, peasant meanness… always saving, but you have no idea what you’re saving up for… Got your fingers badly burned at the last reform, didn’t you. Oh yes! And what about those old hundred-ruble notes you used to paper the inside of your trunks! And the Kerensky rubles! You used the Kerensky notes to light the oven…”
“Well, you see…” I said, recovering my wits slightly.
“Ooh, who’s that?” the pike said in fright.
“I… I’m here by accident, really… I was just going to wash up a little.”
“Wash up! And I thought it was the old woman again. I can’t see too well; I’m old. They tell me the index of refraction in air is quite different. I ordered myself some air goggles once, but then I lost them and I can’t find them again… But who are you, then?”
“A tourist,” I said tersely.
“Ah, a tourist… And I thought it was the old granny again. The things she does to me, you wouldn’t believe! If she catches me she drags me off to the market and sells me. For chowder, so she says. So what else can I do? Naturally, I tell the buyer: It’s like this, you let me go back to my dear little children—only what little children could I have at my age? Those that are still alive are all grandparents by now. You let me go, I say, and I’ll grant you a wish: you just have to say, ‘By the pike’s true command, at my urgent demand.’ And they let me go. Some out of fear, some out of kindness, and some out of sheer greed… So there I go, swimming back along the river, swimming along, and it’s cold and I’ve got rheumatism, until finally I get back into the well, and there’s the old woman again with her bucket…”
The pike ducked under the water, gurgled a bit, releasing a few bubbles, and stuck her head out again. “So what are you going to ask for, my fine soldier boy? Only keep it simple—folks keep asking for televisions and transistor radios and what have you… One fellow went absolutely crazy: ‘Fulfill my annual quota at the sawmill,’ he says. But I can’t go sawing wood at my age.”
“Aha,” I said. “But you could manage a television, then?”
“No,” the pike confessed honestly. “I can’t manage a television. And I can’t do that… music center thing with a record player either. Keep it nice and simple. Something like a nice pair of seven-league boots, or a cap of darkness… Eh?”
My hopes of getting out of changing the oil in the Moskvich wilted and died. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “There isn’t anything I need, really. I’ll just let you go.”
“Good,” said the pike calmly. “I like people like that. There was one not all that long ago… He bought me at the market, so I promised him a king’s daughter. There I was, swimming along the river, feeling so ashamed I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t see where I was going and I swam into these nets. So they pull me out and I’m thinking, now I’ll have to start lying all over again. But what does the man do? He grabs me around the jaws so I can’t open my mouth. That’s it, I thought, they’ll boil me for soup. But no. He clips something on my fin and tosses me back in the river. Look!” The pike rose up out of the bucket and held out a fin with a metal tag clipped around its base. On the tag it said, “This specimen released in the Solova River in 1854. Return to His Imperial Majesty’s Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg.”
“Don’t tell the old woman about it,” the pike warned me. “She’ll rip my fin off to get it. She’s so mean and greedy.”
What could I ask her for? I thought frantically. “How do you work your miracles?”
“What miracles are those?”
“You know… granting wishes…”
“Oh, that! How do I do it? I was trained when I was little, so I just do it. How should I know how I do it? The Golden Fish used to do it even better, but she still died all the same. You can’t cheat fate.” I thought I heard the pike sigh.
“From old age?” I asked.
“What d’you mean, old age? She was still young and full of life… They got her with a depth charge, my soldier boy. Turned her belly up, and sank some submarine that happened to be there as well. She’d have bought them off, but they didn’t bother to ask—the moment they saw her, they just dropped the bomb… That’s the way it goes sometimes.” She paused for a moment. “So, are you letting me go or not? It’s feeling a bit close; there’s going to be a storm.”
“Of course, of course,” I said with a start. “Should I throw you in, or use the bucket?”
“Throw me in, my fine boy, throw me in.”
I carefully lowered my hands into the bucket and lifted out the pike—she weighed at least eight kilograms. She muttered, “Right, then, and if you should happen to fancy a magic tablecloth or a flying carpet, you know where I am… I’ll see you all right.”
“Good-bye,” I said, and released my grip. There was a loud splash.
I stood there for a while, gazing at the green stains on my hands. I felt rather strange. Every now and again I was visited, like a gust of wind, by the realization that I was sitting on the sofa in the room, but I only had to shake my head and there I was back beside the well. Then it passed. I washed up in the fine icy water, filled the car radiator, and had a shave. The old woman still hadn’t put in an appearance. I was hungry, and I had to go into town to the post office, where the guys might already be waiting for me. I locked the car and went out through the gate.
I walked slowly along Curving Seashore Street, with my hands stuck in the pockets of my gray bomber jacket from the GDR, looking down at my feet. The old woman’s copper coins jangled in the back pocket of my favorite jeans, crisscrossed all over with zippers. I thought things over. The thick pamphlets of the “Knowledge” Society had accustomed me to believe that animals were not capable of speech. Ever since I was a child folktales had assured me of the opposite. Naturally, I had agreed with the pamphlets, because I’d never seen any talking animals, not once. Not even parrots. I had known one parrot who could growl like a tiger, but he couldn’t talk like a human being. And now I had the pike, the cat Vasily, and even a mirror. But, then, inanimate objects talked all the time. That was an idea that could never have occurred to my great-granddad, for instance. From his point of view, a talking cat would be nowhere near as fantastic as a shiny wooden box that wheezes, howls, plays music, and speaks all kinds of languages. As far as the cat was concerned, the situation seemed more or less clear. But how did the pike manage to speak? A pike doesn’t have any lungs. That’s certain. True, it must have an air bladder, the function of which, as far as I’m aware, is still not entirely clear to ichthyologists. One ichthyologist I know, Zhenka Skoromakhov, even believes that this function is in fact entirely unclear, and when I try to argue, using the evidence from my “Knowledge” Society pamphlets, Zhenka starts growling and spitting and entirely loses the power of human speech… I have the impression that we still know very little about what animals are capable of. Only recently it was discovered that fish and marine mammals exchange signals underwater. What they write about dolphins is very interesting.
Or take the monkey Raphael, for instance. I’ve seen for myself. True, he can’t actually talk, but he did develop a reflex response: green for a banana, red for an electric shock. And everything was just fine until they switched on the red light and the green light at the same time. Then Raphael started behaving the same way as Zhenka does. He got terribly worked up, started squealing and growling, made a dash at the little window where the experimenter was sitting, and started spitting at it. And then there’s that joke—one monkey says to another, “Do you know what a conditioned reflex is? It’s when the bell rings and all those pseudo-monkeys in white coats come running across with bananas and sweets.” It’s all highly complicated, of course. The terminology hasn’t been developed yet. In such circumstances, you feel absolutely helpless when you try to answer questions about the psychology and potential abilities of animals. But then, on the other hand, it doesn’t make you feel any better when they give you, say, that stellar statistics–type system of integral equations with unknown functions under the integral. The important thing is to think. As Pascal said, “Let us learn to think well—that is the fundamental principle of morality.”